In the spring of 1945, American troops had begun to conquer the Third Reich from the west—town by town, village by village. Recording the action were U.S. Army Signal Corps cameramen embedded within combat units. Their handiwork—more than a thousand rolls of film—has been unearthed in the National Archives and edited into this feature-length program, which includes previously unseen footage from the Arnoldsweiler concentration camp, the U.S. Army's advance through Cologne and Frankfurt, the handling and treatment of German POWs, and other images of victory and defeat, death and desperation, and the liberation and ruin left behind.